Reader's Digest

views updated

Reader's Digest

The moral obligation to save time has been a sovereign force in American culture since colonial days. Time saving took on added importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when businessmen sought to standardize the performance of the country's growing industrial sector. This movement toward greater efficiency extended into personal lives as well, as people sought to maximize their own working and leisure time. An instant success that went on to become the most powerful vehicle for the printed word in the world, Reader's Digest was only one expression of the time-saving vogue when it was introduced in 1922. Printed in a handy booklet form that made it suitable for slipping into a coat pocket or purse, Reader's Digest featured 31 articles, one for each day of the month, culled from leading magazines, "each article of enduring value and interest, in condensed and permanent form," as the magazine maintained.

Reader's Digest did not introduce the concept of sampling and condensing other publications. An American magazine called Littell's Living Age first reprinted periodical articles in 1844. Almost 50 years later, Literary Digest, founded by Isaac Kauffman Funk of Funk & Wagnalls fame, capitalized upon the success of a British periodical, Review of Reviews, and presented condensations of articles from American, Canadian, and European publications. The highbrow Literary Digest achieved a circulation of over one million by 1927, earning praise from Time magazine (another 1920s time-saving publication) as "one of the greatest publishing successes in history." But Literary Digest fell out of the reading public's good graces in 1936 when it incorrectly predicted that Franklin D. Roosevelt would lose in a landslide in one of the first national presidential preference polls. The magazine failed the following year, not long after Roosevelt was inaugurated for the second of his record four terms.

The less esoteric Reader's Digest was the brainchild of William Roy DeWitt Wallace (1889-1981), a Minnesota-born college dropout who, according to biographer Peter Canning, touted various "schemes and stunts" as a young man. While employed as a traveling salesman, Wallace would condense and memorize important facts from magazine articles on three-by-five slips of paper in an effort to impress customers. He suffered shrapnel injuries fighting in France in World War I, and he read a variety of popular magazines and practiced condensing their articles while he recovered. His college professor father loaned him $300 and in January 1920 Wallace produced a 64-page prototype issue of Reader's Digest, complete with 31 articles from publications such as Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's, and Vanity Fair. Potential publishers—such as William Randolph Hearst—rejected the magazine's concept as interesting but without any commercial promise because of an assumed limited readership and Wallace's determination not to have illustrations or advertisements detract from the reading material in his magazine.

While searching for a publisher, Wallace met feminist reformer Lila Acheson (1887-1984). She was not looking for a husband so much as a business partner in life. She encouraged Wallace to publish Reader's Digest himself and helped him advertise and process the first subscription orders. The couple married in Pleasantville, New York, and with $5,000 in advance subscription orders established the Reader's Digest Association in the New York City suburb in 1921. Pleasantville became the headquarters of the Reader's Digest empire, as the first issue went out the following January. The magazine was an immediate success, capitalizing on self-education and self-confidence crazes then underway, a growing sense of national pride, and the omnipresent desire of readers to save time.

Except for a signature line drawing of a woman within a circle on the front cover, the drab text-only early Reader's Digest was issued without artwork or illustrations until November 1939. That drawing was removed in 1942 to be replaced by the magazine's table of contents. The front-cover table of contents became a trademark for Reader's Digest until May 1998, when it was moved inside the magazine, its cover spot replaced by a photograph. A greater number of illustrations began appearing with articles in the 1970s and 1980s, giving the magazine a greater visual appeal. The Wallaces were able to support their publication on circulation revenues until the 1950s, using their financial freedom to espouse populist causes that other magazines were less willing to discuss. Eventually, however, a survey revealed that 80 percent of readers preferred advertising over increased subscription costs and advertisements began appearing in April 1955, generating as much as $91,000 per page by the 1980s. Tobacco advertisements, a mainstay for many periodicals, were never accepted and the first liquor advertisement did not appear in Reader's Digest until 1979; no advertisement has ever appeared on the last page of the magazine—an attractive picture or art reprint, suitable for coffee-table display, always graced the magazine's back cover. Many reprints came from the magazine's own collection of original art.

Wallace never surveyed readers about their article preferences. Until he and his wife turned over control of the magazine to senior editors during the 1970s, he selected the articles for condensation based on what interested him, mindful of the need to appeal to a large audience of both sexes and all educational levels. In 1954, Reader's Digest business manager Albert Cole called the magazine "the greatest common denominator in communications we have." The topics were almost always universal: science and nature, morals, health, ordeals, education, biography, animals, lifestyle, sex, and humor. The contents remained remarkably similar over the years, including feature departments such as "My Most Unforgettable Character," "Humor in Uniform," "Campus Comedy," "Life in These United States," "Picturesque Speech," "News in Medicine," and "It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power." Occasionally, Wallace's personal tastes intruded. Often, articles were heartwarming and inspirational, involved personal success stories such as his own, or advocated a nondenominational Protestantism that was described as "muscular Christianity."

Carl Sandburg once complained that Reader's Digest was "often as solemn as death and now and then funny as a barrel of monkeys." The Wallaces were criticized for their socially and politically conservative agenda, which chided labor, big government, and any form of political radicalism, and their all but open endorsement of the Republican Party. The magazine's staff even wrote articles for other publications, adhering to the Wallaces' conservative leanings, so that they could be reprinted in Reader's Digest. The magazine defended such "plants" as a means of providing proper editorial balance. The magazine was also criticized for refusing to publish any letters to the editor, especially corrections or rebuttals. The editors maintained that the mail was usually evenly split, making letters unnecessary. Furthermore, Reader's Digest articles were shortened by as much as three-fourths from the manuscripts, leading to complaints that the condensations diluted or lost the entire point of the original. Although conservative, the magazine did not shy away from controversy. Some Reader's Digest articles reported on medical or scientific breakthroughs years before details appeared in other publications. The magazine also published crusading articles on venereal disease, cigarette smoking, safe driving, conservation, and other populist-style issues. Competitors such as Literary Digest, Quick, and Esquire's one-time popular Coronet tried but failed to seriously challenge Reader's Digest.

From 5,000 first issues, the circulation of Reader's Digest soared for most of the twentieth century. The Wallaces kept circulation figures secret until 1936, but the number of copies exceeded 200,000 by 1930, one million in 1935, and nine million by 1950. In 1954, it was estimated that one out of every four families in the United States received the magazine. The domestic circulation peaked at over 17 million copies in 1984, second only to TV Guide. The magazine's profits were enhanced by a series of foreign editions, beginning with Great Britain in 1938 and extending to 49 international editions, published in 19 languages, with a total circulation of over 28 million that made Reader's Digest the most widely read periodical on the planet.

In 1934, Wallace added a condensed book section as a regular feature to the magazine and it led to a Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club in 1950. In 1965, he purchased Funk and Wagnalls, publishers of the Literary Digest, and added their extensive line of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and reference works to his magazine's book publishing division. Records, movies, and video sales were added, along with a direct mail sweepstakes competition that landed the Reader's Digest Association in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission until an agreement was reached in 1983. Their longstanding belief in the Golden Rule induced the Wallaces to fund the Reader's Digest Foundation, one of the greatest philanthropic institutions of its time. The foundation supported a variety of causes, including education, the arts, and major projects such as a new contemporary wing for New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the effort to move Egypt's Abu Simbel temple up the Nile Valley to make way for the Aswan High Dam.

The Wallaces gradually passed on control of their magazine during the 1960s and 1970s. DeWitt died in 1981 and Lila in 1984. As biographer John Heidenry explained, during a management struggle days before her death, Lila sought to return the magazine to "old fashioned American values." The once powerful magazine began to flounder without the Wallaces at the helm. The Reader's Digest Association began buying other magazines in 1986, but the new titles were plagued by mounting losses that hurt the magazine's once-enviable profit margin. Advertising losses, increasing competition, and the aging of its core readership dogged Reader's Digest into the 1990s, even in the profitable book and home entertainment groups. The company's stock price dropped from $56 in 1992 to $17 in 1998. An outside chairman and chief executive officer, Thomas Ryder, was hired to revitalize the magazine in 1998. Ryder began a cost-cutting campaign that included employee layoffs, a magazine redesign, the auction of 39 pieces from the magazine's prized art collection, and a self-admitted drop in Reader's Digest domestic circulation base from 15 to 12.5 million copies. At the end of the twentieth century, the magazine was discussing such possibilities as Reader's Digest madefor-television movies to attract a new and younger audience, along with a merger with another media corporation. Observers, however, could not help but notice that time may have finally caught up with Reader's Digest.

—Richard Digby-Junger